 167. The 'Way' (The Law) |
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The Discovery of the Gospel of Thomas
In December of 1945 an Egyptian farmer named Muhammed 'Ali went out to the cliffs that skirt the Nile as it winds its way through Upper Egypt near the town of Nag Hammadi. As he and his brother searched for a naturally occurring form of fertilizer to be spread on their fields, they came across an earthenware jar of obviously ancient origin. When they broke open the jar, they discovered inside a cache of thirteen leather-bound codices--papyrus books--containing more than fifty individual tractates of various origin.
It was not the monetary treasure they had hoped for, but even in 1945 the antiquities trade in Upper Egypt was brisk enough that Mohammed 'Ali could guess that such a collection of crusty ancient books would have some value in the marketplace. What he did not know was that he had just uncovered one of the most important archaeological finds in the history of New Testament scholarship and the study of early Christianity. Though perhaps less widely known, the Nag Hammadi library is every bit as revolutionary for the study of the New Testament as the Dead Sea Scrolls are for the study of the Hebrew Bible.
The significance of the find first became evident some three years later, when the French scholar and dealer in antiquities Jean Doresse, working for a Cairo antiquities dealer, made an inventory of the tractates contained in these papyrus codices. Among them he found a variety of treatises, some of them previously known, others known only through references to them in various ancient authors. Many of the treatises have an obviously gnostic orientation, some are ascetic, some Jewish, and, though unrecognized by Doresse at the time, one is even a classical text, a short excerpt from Plato's Republic.
At the end of the second tractate in Codex II -- a collection of tractates -- Doresse found the title of a text that had been lost for a thousand years: Peuaggelion Pkata Thomas, The Gospel according to Thomas. The Coptic manuscript of Thomas was written about 350 C.E.; the Greek fragments of Thomas have been dated to around 200 C.E., based on an analysis of the writing style. Thomas probably assumed its present form by 100 C.E., although an earlier edition may have originated as early as 50-60 C.E.
Thomas is a collection of one hundred fourteen sayings of Jesus, listed serially, each introduced by the simple formula, "Jesus said", or alternatively, "he said". For all practical purposes, Thomas is a gospel without a narrative framework; it is a sayings gospel. Scholars have long speculated that Matthew and Luke made use of a similar collection of sayings in creating their gospels; that hypothetical collection has come to be known as Q. Specialists in Q and Thomas have determined that Thomas is not derived from Q but is an entirely independent sayings gospel, parts of which may be as old as Q. In any case, the discovery of Thomas has demonstrated that a form of gospel literature consisting of sayings actually existed and was in use among some early Christian groups. The discovery has also provided scholars with an ancient and promising new fund of sayings and parables attributed to Jesus.
